California SB 277: New evidence that restricting nonmedical exemptions to school vaccine requirements works

The following excerpt is from an article that originally appeared on Science Based Medicine

[Editor’s note:This is a special bonus post. Dr. Gorski will have another post tomorrow.]

The Disneyland measles outbreak began over the Christmas holidays of 2014 and continued for several months into 2015, ultimately spanning eight states and two additional countries (Canada and Mexico). It also represented a seismic shift in the battle to contain the malign influence of the antivaccine movement in that the outbreak centered at the Magic Kingdom made it possible for California legislators to do something that would definitely not have been possible before the outbreak: Pass a law outlawing “personal belief exemptions” (a.k.a. nonmedical exemptions) to school vaccine requirements. Indeed, given that, prior to the outbreak, only two states (Mississippi and West Virginia) allowed only medical exemptions and the other 48 states allowed some combination of religious or personal belief exemptions (PBEs, or, as I like to call them, “I don’t wanna” exemptions), California was